How to Put Email 1, Email 2 and Personal Email Into One Column Before You Verify

To put several email columns into one, write one row for each address: copy the contact's other columns onto every row, put the address in a single Email column, and add a column that says which original column it came from. A contact with three addresses becomes three rows. That shape is what verification tools and most importers expect, and it is the only way to be sure every address gets checked. This post covers why it matters, how to do it, and what to do with the results.

Turn email columns into rows →

Where multi-column email lists come from

Lead exports often arrive with more than one address per person:

• A CRM export with Email, Email 2 and Personal email.
• A data provider that returns a work address, a guessed pattern and a personal address.
• A merged file where you combined two sources and kept both addresses side by side.
• A form that asked for a primary and a backup address.

All of these make sense as data. None of them work as an upload. A verifier asks you to choose one column, and a sequencer imports one email field. So the question is what happens to everything outside that column.

What goes wrong when you pick one column

Say you choose Email and verify it. The Email 2 and Personal email columns are not looked at. Three things follow.

1. Their addresses are never checked. If you later send to them, because the first address bounced or because you wanted a second shot, they have no verification behind them.
2. You cannot compare. Whether the first address is better than the second is a question you can only answer if both were checked.
3. Bounces arrive later. A bounce from an unchecked address looks like a surprise, but it was a predictable gap.

The fix is to give every address a row. Then one verification run covers all of them, and you decide afterwards which to keep.

What the output looks like

Every column that is not an address column is copied onto each new row. Then come two additions:

• Email. One address.
• Email column. The name of the column the address came from, such as Email 2.

A contact with three addresses becomes three rows with the same name and company. A contact with no address in any chosen column is dropped, and the tool counts how many were dropped so you know. Addresses are lower-cased.

A cell holding several addresses separated by semicolons, commas, spaces or line breaks gives one row for each address. That happens a lot in exports where a contact has a list of addresses crammed into one cell. If you only need to split those cells and not combine columns, the split multiple emails in cell tool is the narrower tool.

Step by step

1. Upload the list as .xlsx or CSV, or paste the cells with the header row first.
2. Check the columns chosen as address columns. The tool picks a column when at least half of its filled cells hold an address, or when its header mentions email and it holds at least one. Tick any it missed and untick any it chose wrongly. A column of notes that sometimes holds an address, for example, should usually be left out.
3. Read the counts. You see how many rows came out, how many contacts had several addresses and how many had none.
4. Download the CSV.
5. Verify the Email column. Use the check button under the result, or upload the file at /verify.

The file is read and rewritten in your browser, and nothing is uploaded to SimpleVerifier.

How repeats are handled

Repeats come in two kinds, and the tool treats them differently on purpose.

The same address twice for one contact. If one contact has the same address in Email and in Email 2, it is kept once, in the first column. There is no reason to verify or send to it twice.

The same address on two different contacts. This is kept on both rows. It may be a shared mailbox such as a team address that two people list as theirs, and removing it from one person would change your data. If you want each address only once in the whole file, use the duplicate email remover afterwards. For a wider treatment of duplicates across sources, see our post on duplicate leads across CRM sources.

Verify every row, then decide

With one row per address, you can verify them all and see how each came out. Upload the new file at /verify. SimpleVerifier checks each address against the mail server and returns valid, risky or invalid, with the reason. SimpleVerifier Pro is $39 a month, with the first 100,000 checks a month at full speed, then slower, never cut off.

Because the source-column field survives, you can then ask useful questions of the result:

• Which source column gives the most valid addresses?
• For contacts with several addresses, how many have at least one valid one?
• Is the personal address better or worse than the work address on this list?

You answer them from your own file, with your own list, rather than from a general claim.

Choose one address per contact afterwards

Many sequences send to one address per person. Once every address has been verified, you can keep a single one. A common rule is to prefer a valid work address and fall back to a valid personal one, but the rule is yours.

The primary email picker chooses one address per contact from several according to rules you set. Our post on what to do when a lead has several addresses lays out the trade-offs between sending to one, sending to both, and sending in sequence.

Do the picking after verification, not before. Picking first means you choose between addresses you know nothing about, and you may keep a dead one over a live one.

Check headers before you import

Header names are copied as they are. If your importer is strict about names, such as wanting First Name and not first_name, rename them before importing. Our post on cleaning CSV columns before an import covers renaming and reordering, and the Email column the tool adds is called Email, which most importers recognise.

If the file arrived with the wrong separator and the columns look jumbled, fix that first with the CSV delimiter converter, because a tool cannot find address columns in a file whose cells are stuck together.

Limits

• It rearranges addresses. It cannot tell which one the person reads.
• A column of phone numbers or notes that happens to hold an address is treated as an address column if ticked.
• A contact with no address is dropped, not kept as an empty row.
• Header names are copied as they are, so rename them first if the importer is strict.

A checklist

1. List every column that might hold an address, including notes columns where someone pasted one.
2. Flatten the file to one row per address.
3. Check the count of dropped contacts. A large number means a column was missed.
4. Verify the Email column, and keep the results with the source column attached.
5. Choose one address per contact if your sequence needs one, then import.

The point of the exercise is simple: an address you never checked is an address you are guessing about. One row per address removes the guess.